Scientific Apologetics

I think it’s very important to understand why you believe what you believe. Buying into an idea without a firm grasp on why you agree with it is a terrible idea. Even if you come to a different conclusion from someone else, anchoring on some solid basis is the best way to discuss and debate belief in a reasonable and effective way.

Personally, I anchor myself to science and the scientific method. Observable and quantifiable results are the best way to measure and understand something. The weird thing is that I’ve also applied that mentality to my approach to religion. Science has driven my perspective on religious beliefs.

Before I get too deep into this topic, I want to define a few concepts so that we’re on the same page. If you disagree with one of these definitions, it’s probably going to make the rest of the discussion pointless.

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose an event has two possible explanations. The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct. (Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.[1][2] As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."[3] (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox)

Now, onto the fun stuff. I’m going to try to drive this discussion in a very logical process where I assert some sort of statement and then explain why I believe that to be the case. If I am successful, this article will have fully explained my thought process. Whether you agree with it or not is up to you.

1. We are not (or shouldn’t be) special.

I’m not talking about “everyone is a special snowflake” special. I mean that we as humanity are not substantially different from life as a whole. Yes, we do have better cognitive ability than apparently all other species on Earth, but we didn’t somehow earn that status or gain what we know by some alternate means. We’re smarter than the average bear, but only because we’ve learned more.

2. As intelligent life, we appear to be alone in the universe.

The Fermi paradox tells us that given the age of the universe and the probable frequency with which complex life evolves, there should be other civilizations in the universe that are substantially more developed than us. They should be so developed, in fact, that they have already reached beyond their own collective solar systems and begun to explore the cosmos. Furthermore, they should have been broadcasting some form of communication for likely hundreds of millions of years. If anybody else is out there, we should have seen evidence of them by now.

There are plenty of answers to Fermi’s paradox. Maybe there was intelligent life and it got wiped out long ago. Maybe there IS intelligent life besides us, and they just aren’t broadcasting any evidence of their own existence. Maybe some bigger and badder civilization is seeking out any competitors and swiftly eliminating them as they are found.

Or, maybe we’re it. Maybe complex life is common enough, but intelligent life is limited to just what we have here on the pale blue dot. Sure, maybe there are multiple planets of octopus analogues and tree analogues and all kinds of other life that is similar to what we see on Earth, but nothing that is smart enough and capable enough to travel and communicate into space.

3. If we truly are alone, we must somehow be special.

Imagine, then, that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. If that’s the case, I think it makes logical sense that something actually IS special about us. It doesn’t seem like it should be, but then again, it also seems like every other galaxy should have had some form of intelligent life that we would at least see some ancient relic of. They’ve seen what appears to be ancient water deltas on the surface of Mars. It would make sense if something at some point lived in those waters. We haven’t found any firm evidence of it, though, and we don’t see any cave writings or anything like that where some old society would have left its mark.

Something has to be different about us. Biologically and genetically, we’re just another form of life. But we have leveraged our brains and talents to do absurd things. We’ve sent people to the moon. We have probes all throughout the solar system. With enough time, we will pave a way into interstellar space. If we can do all that where it looks like no other beings in the universe have, I feel like there’s something else to humanity than just biology.

4. Without some far-reaching logical leaps, divine intervention seems like the most fitting answer.

As I mentioned before, there are plenty of alternate answers to the Fermi paradox that don’t involve any sort of deity. There are natural phenomena that could result in exactly the situation that we see today. But personally, I just feel like they’re so statistically unlikely, and they require such specific conditions to occur, it makes sense that one or more deity of some sort weighed in on our understanding of the physical world to give us a leg up.

And if you take a good hard look at the physical world, there are so many things we don’t know. We’re pretty sure dark matter exists, but have no idea how to synthesize or observe it beyond gravitational pull. Similarly, dark energy would account for universal expansion acceleration, but we can’t get a bead on that one either. Maybe what we thought were firm laws of physics are just suggestions. There are so many things we don’t know that the existence of a god of some kind seems like not such a far-fetched conclusion.

I could unpack this more, but it gets crazy after a while and I forget how I got to a given conclusion with enough musing. This is sort of the starting point in my head, and I wanted to share it for others to see. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m putting science and religion in places they don’t belong, but I really feel like we need to put a lot of thought into why we’re here and how we got here to begin with. Life is a big, beautiful, unexpected thing and I just want to explore as much of it as we can.